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Historian Douglas Brinkley's insightful Tour of Duty covers John Kerry's heroic Vietnam service (where he won the Silver and Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts) and the fervent antiwar campaign it eventually spawned. Born to Boston Brahmin heritage, the son of an American diplomat, John Forbes Kerry was a child of good fortune--an eventual Yalie whose personal hero (John Fitzgerald Kennedy) shared his initials. However, Kerry's privileged upbringing instilled in him not a sense of entitlement, but a burning sense of public service. Though equally obsessed and revulsed by the burgeoning Vietnam conflict, Kerry's sense of duty led him to enlist in the Navy (after graduating Yale), and then volunteer for training as captain of a Swift boat (small aluminum vessels that patrolled the coastal waters and narrow, dangerous tributaries of Vietnam's massive Mekong delta). Brinkley's meticulous research relies on Kerry's detailed wartime diaries, logs, and interviews, (published here for the first time) as well as a wealth of accounts of the Navy's first extensive "brown water" riverine campaign since the Civil War. Those harrowing months only deepened Kerry's antipathy to the war, and he returned to become one of the most articulate leaders of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Brinkley's account gives crucial human dimensions to a man whose seeming aloofness has long plagued him. With Americans again dying in a controversial war halfway around the world, one cannot help but wonder if Kerry will yet again be able to pose the haunting question first put to a Congressional panel thirty years ago: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" --Jerry McCulley
From Publishers Weekly
Popular historian Brinkley's account of John Kerry's Vietnam experience could easily serve as the first part of a multivolume biography, examining the senator and presidential candidate's early life in rigorous detail. Entering the U.S. Navy soon after graduating from Yale in 1966, Lieutenant (junior grade) Kerry commanded two Swift boat crews on river patrols in Vietnam, earning a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. He kept "voluminous" notes during his service, maintained extensive correspondence with friends and family, and tape-recorded interviews with combat-seasoned comrades. With unrestricted access to this archival material and interviews with Kerry and surviving crewmates, Brinkley (coauthor with Stephen Ambrose of The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation) depicts war in riveting detail, down to what music the crew of PCF-94 listened to on patrol. Though clearly centering his attention on Kerry, Brinkley also stresses the navy's under-recognized role in Vietnam while emphasizing the "true battlefield heroism" of American forces. Kerry's combat experiences make for gripping reading, and later sections on his high-profile role in the antiwar movement are equally engrossing, including the Nixon White House's efforts (involving a young Armistead Maupin) to discredit veteran-turned-antiwar-activist Kerry as a "phony." Final chapters fully address Kerry's political failures in the early 1970s while quickly summarizing later successes and how these successes were shaped by his Vietnam experience and ongoing relationships with fellow veterans. Though never intended as a political biography, this book offers perhaps the most insightful examination available of the character of this or any other Democratic candidate. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com
In Tour of Duty, Douglas Brinkley's comprehensive and sympathetic account of John Kerry's experiences during the Vietnam War, we learn that the senator from an early age had a well-developed sense of destiny. Even in prep school, Kerry liked to hold forth on the great political issues of the day and hinted that he felt called to public service. A driven, gifted student who according to Brinkley excelled at everything he tried, Kerry supported John F. Kennedy's presidential bid in 1960 and later met the president while dating Janet Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy's half-sister.Kerry enlisted in the Navy in February 1966, a few months before his graduation from Yale University. Already then he had some misgivings about the war in Vietnam, and about the direction of U.S. foreign policy generally. Selected to deliver his Class of 1966 oration, Kerry used it to ask probing questions about the Johnson administration's approach to world affairs, warning that "an excess of isolationism [in the 1930s] has become an excess of interventionism."Brinkley passes up the chance to probe deeply into why a man with such doubts would choose to enlist; he is content merely to say that Kerry, like many others in his graduating class, felt duty-bound to serve. And serve Kerry did, with bravery and distinction. The heart of the book details the young lieutenant's experiences in 1968-69 as commander of two "Swift" boats, small craft that patrolled the web of inland waterways in the Mekong Delta of South Vietnam. Kerry received the Purple Heart three times for wounds suffered in action, and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Navy's Silver Star for courageous action. He quickly earned the respect and loyalty of his crewmen. "He was in total control, and willing to be aggressive," recalls one of them. "He wanted to take the fight to the enemy. . . . I'm talking straight: he always put his men's welfare first, and was tough, tough, tough. He was a great leader."Brinkley narrates the story well, if at times in excessive detail. He is not always sure-footed on the broader history of the war -- he wrongly implies that no U.S. destroyer was fired upon during the Gulf of Tonkin Incident in August 1964, and is fuzzy and contradictory on the emergence and nature of the Viet Cong -- but his treatment of the hitherto little-chronicled riverine war, and Kerry's role in it, is well researched and often gripping.The author is also smart enough to let his subject speak for himself, by quoting extensively from Kerry's journals and letters. And here is a revelation. The senator, so often criticized for being wooden and prolix in his campaign speeches, turns out to be a marvelously skilled writer. Time and again we encounter candid and moving passages, delivered with sparse clarity, many of them showing Kerry's growing disillusionment with the war in general and the river operations in particular. At an early point he wrote his family:"Every so often, there would be an open field where there were a few huts and people working in it with their pant trousers rolled up and their large hats covering up expressionless faces. How could these people really believe we are helping them? It seemed so utterly crazy -- the idea of all this modern equipment fighting for an ideal that meant nothing to those whom the fighting was supposed to be for. . . . I can't help getting the feeling that their faces seemed to say, 'Go away and let us alone.' "Coming home, Kerry became a leading spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). Invited to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in early 1971, he spoke for two hours, objecting to the rationale behind the war, to the way it was being fought, and to the nation's poor treatment of the soldiers who survived it. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" he asked the lawmakers. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"It was a riveting performance. "In the space of two hours he became a bona-fide celebrity," Brinkley writes, "the household name and face of the Vietnam veterans' protest." A flood of speaking engagements and television appearances followed, even a "60 Minutes" profile, in which Morley Safer asked Kerry if he wanted to be president of the United States. "No," the young man replied. "That's such a crazy question when there are so many things to be done and I don't know whether I could do them."If, as now seems certain, Kerry wins the Democratic nomination this year, Republican operatives will try to focus popular attention on this post-combat Kerry, the one with the longish hair and grimy fatigue jacket, the better to suggest he was a radical who dishonored his country and his fellow veterans with his protesting. The effort has indeed already begun.Judging by the evidence in this book, however, their task will not be easy. Tour of Duty shows Kerry to have been a moderating influence on the VVAW and the antiwar movement more broadly, a voice of caution who counseled nonviolence and working within the political system. When the VVAW became too radicalized for Kerry's liking, he resigned.In this respect, Brinkley's unabashedly admiring book accords well with what both supporters and detractors over the years have singled out as a defining Kerry characteristic: his careful, color-inside-the-lines approach to social and political issues. What the book also shows, however, on the basis of abundant evidence, is that the young Ivy Leaguer who went off and fought in Vietnam and then returned home to fight against the war was a born leader and a man of uncommon insight and intelligence. Not bad qualifications for the highest office in the land. Reviewed by Fredrik LogevallCopyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.
From AudioFile
With a chest full of medals-three Purple Hearts, Bronze and Silver Stars-Vietnam veteran John F. Kerry returned home a passionate activist against that war. After earning a Harvard law degree, Kerry was elected a U.S. Senator (D- Massachusetts) and is now the leading candidate for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination. This compelling biography details the judgment, heroism, and compassion of his wartime service and presents an unflinching account of the brutal actuality of jungle war fought by inadequately trained soldiers in a complex foreign setting. Innovative packaging is a helpful bonus. Each CD is a different color: red, white, blue, bronze, and silver. L.C. © AudioFile 2004, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine
From Booklist
The Vietnam War has deep footprints, especially for political candidates whose valor in combat often becomes a key platform plank. Presidential candidate John Kerry's service as a navy gunboat captain in the Mekong Delta is a key part of his stump speech. For Kerry and his campaign, however, Vietnam is especially defining in that it showcases not just leadership under fire but also the development of his antiwar activism, which established Kerry as an articulate opponent of the war with the credentials to give his words weight. Brinkley's account follows an adventurous young Kerry as he enlists straight out of Yale and requests dangerous river duty, where he witnesses horrible things, gets wounded, and becomes anxious about the distance between the administration's objectives and the experiences of soldiers. Yet Brinkley also consistently strives to show us that Kerry was different from other soldiers--more intellectual, less prone to vice, always striving for perspective on his actions. Built out of interviews and historical research, as well as Kerry's diaries, there is enough of a war narrative here to satisfy Vietnam buffs, even if they aren't interested in Kerry's politics. Political buffs will do best to wade patiently through the combat action, which is followed by the veteran's antiwar testimony before Congress. This would be a timely book even if Kerry weren't running for president. Brendan Driscoll
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Book Description
Covering more than four decades, Tour of Duty is the definitive account of John Kerry's journey from war to peace. Written by acclaimed historian Douglas Brinkley, this is the first full-scale, intimate account of Kerry's naval career. In writing this riveting narrative, Brinkley has drawn on extensive interviews with virtually everyone who knew Kerry well in Vietnam, including all the men still living who served under him. Kerry also entrusted to Brinkley his letters home from Vietnam and his voluminous "War Notes" -- journals, notebooks, and personal reminiscences written during and shortly after the war. This material was provided without restriction, to be used at Brinkley's discretion, and has never before been published.
John Kerry enlisted in the Navy in February 1966, months before he graduated from Yale. In December 1967 Ensign Kerry was assigned to the frigate U.S.S. Gridley; after five months of service in the Pacific, with a brief stop in Vietnam, he returned to the United States and underwent training to command a Swift boat, a small craft deployed in Vietnam's rivers. In June 1968 Kerry was promoted to lieutenant (junior grade), and by the end of that year he was back in Vietnam, where he commanded, over time, two Swift boats. Throughout Tour of Duty Brinkley deftly deals with such explosive issues as U.S. atrocities in Vietnam and the bombing of Cambodia. In a series of unforgettable combat-action sequences, he recounts how Kerry won the Purple Heart three times for wounds suffered in action and was awarded the Bronze Star and the Navy’s Silver Star for gallantry in action.
When Kerry returned from Southeast Asia, he joined the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), becoming a prominent antiwar spokesperson. He challenged the Nixon administration on Capitol Hill with the antiwar movement cheering him on. As Kerry's public popularity soared in April-May 1971, the FBI considered him a subversive. Brinkley -- using new information acquired from the recently released Nixon tapes -- reveals how White House aides Charles Colson and H. R. Haldeman tried to discredit Kerry. Refusing to be intimidated, Kerry started running for public office, eventually becoming a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. But he never forgot his fallen comrades. Working with his friend Senator John McCain, he returned to Vietnam numerous times looking for MIAs and POWs. By the time Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Kerry was the leading proponent of "normalization" of relations with Vietnam. When President Clinton officially recognized Vietnam in 1995, Kerry's three-decade-long tour of duty had at long last ended.
About the Author
Douglas Brinkley is director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies and professor of history at the University of New Orleans. Brinkley's recent publications include Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company and a Century of Progress and The Mississippi and the Making of a Nation with Stephen E. Ambrose. He lives in New Orleans with his wife, Anne, and daughter, Benton.
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